All Around Us

DIRECTOR: Ryosuke Hashiguchi - Japan

"This wise and deliciously witty film chronicles eight years of a marriage.In 1992, shoe repairman Kanao ties the knot with Shoko, who works in publishing, because he's got her pregnant.Apart from liking each other, they don't have too much in common.She's a bit of a control freak, and he's, well, loose and easy-going.Kanao takes over a TV news job as a courtroom sketch-artist and he soon finds himself exposed to--and drawing--some of the most disturbed people in Japan, from child murderers to a member of the Aum sect which gas-attacked the Tokyo subway.Meanwhile Shoko, traumatized...

"This wise and deliciously witty film chronicles eight years of a marriage.In 1992, shoe repairman Kanao ties the knot with Shoko, who works in publishing, because he's got her pregnant.Apart from liking each other, they don't have too much in common.She's a bit of a control freak, and he's, well, loose and easy-going.Kanao takes over a TV news job as a courtroom sketch-artist and he soon finds himself exposed to--and drawing--some of the most disturbed people in Japan, from child murderers to a member of the Aum sect which gas-attacked the Tokyo subway.Meanwhile Shoko, traumatized by a miscarriage, begins to fall apart; she needs to retreat from her job and from Tokyo to recover her equilibrium.Through it all Hashiguchi gets right to the heart of what it takes for two people to nurture each other and hold it all together." --Vancouver Film Festival.

As Simple As That

DIRECTOR: Seyyed Reza Mir-Karimi - Iran

A nuanced portrait of a religious housewife in distress, As Simple As That offers a rare, realistic depiction of a middle class Iranian woman.Put-upon Tanareh has a problem common to all sorts of women world-wide: she's suffering form a stressful routine so centered on husband, kids and home that she's completely lost any sense of herself, and has fallen into a deep depression.Her self-absorbed husband is an engineer who is so busy that he doesn't bother to tell her that he's changed the number of their joint bank account; their two materialistic children are hurtfully unappreciative of her...

A nuanced portrait of a religious housewife in distress, As Simple As That offers a rare, realistic depiction of a middle class Iranian woman.Put-upon Tanareh has a problem common to all sorts of women world-wide: she's suffering form a stressful routine so centered on husband, kids and home that she's completely lost any sense of herself, and has fallen into a deep depression.Her self-absorbed husband is an engineer who is so busy that he doesn't bother to tell her that he's changed the number of their joint bank account; their two materialistic children are hurtfully unappreciative of her efforts to cook, clean and coach them.The preparations for her neighbor's wedding lead her, inevitably, to a reassessment of her life.

Filmography: The Child and the Soldier (00), So Close, So Far (04), Under the Moonlight (05).